Caliban and the Witch

The Hidden Abode of Accumulation

Classic political economy – from Smith to Marx – tends to focus on the factory and the market. It assumes the worker arrives at the factory gate ready to sell their labour. But it rarely asks: how was that worker produced?

Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004) fills this silence. It is a historical audit of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, arguing that the accumulation of capital required a prior accumulation of labour-power. This was not a peaceful evolution of commerce, but a violent restructuring of social relations, centered on the control of women’s bodies.

The Great Enclosure

Federici argues that the rise of capitalism required two simultaneous enclosures:

• The Enclosure of Land: Stripping the peasantry of the commons (forests, pastures) to create a landless proletariat dependent on wages.
• The Enclosure of the Body: Stripping women of their control over reproduction to transform them into machines for the production of new workers.

The 'Great Witch Hunt' of the 16th and 17th centuries was not a relapse into superstitious barbarism, but a calculated political campaign. By criminalising birth control, non-procreative sexuality, and female medical knowledge (midwifery), the emerging State broke the resistance of the peasantry and instituted a new sexual division of labour.

The Devaluation of Care

For the Social Economy, Federici’s analysis is vital because it explains the origins of unpaid labour. By confining women to the sphere of 'Social Reproduction' (cooking, cleaning, birthing, caring) and defining this work as an act of love rather than an economic contribution, capitalism secured a limitless supply of free labour to sustain its workforce.

Why This Matters

This text serves as the necessary corrective to the Proudhonian Sociology collection. While Proudhon and the early mutualists successfully theorised the 'Collective Force' of the workshop, they largely ignored the infrastructure of the home.

To audit the economy of production without auditing the economy of reproduction is to present a fraudulent balance sheet. We cannot build a truly non-extractive economy if we only democratise the workplace while ignoring the kitchen.